The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $6.1 million, five-year award to accelerate fundamental research on wireless communication and networking technologies through the foundation’s Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program.

Jessy Grizzle, a robotics engineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (UM) and team, are developing feedback and control algorithms that one day will give bipedal robots the balance needed to conduct search and rescue missions in dangerous environments.

Leaders from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy sign a memorandum of understanding, signifying DOE’s inclusion in the National Robotics Initiative. Credit: NSF/Sandy Schaeffer

Yesterday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) — in partnership with the Department of Defense (DOD), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) — announced $37 million in new awards to spur the development and use of co-robots, robots that work cooperatively with people.

This image of a robot arm, developed by the Stanford Research Institute, is similar to the one that appeared in the 1976 NSF Annual Report. The robotic system used computer vision to identify and make decisions about parts on an assembly line. This is one of several projects from that era aimed at improving the productivity of American manufacturing processes. Credit: SRI International

Today the National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the National Institutes of Health, US Department of Agriculture and NASA announced $31.5 million in new awards to spur the development and use of co-robot — robots that work cooperatively with people.

National Science Foundation (NSF) efforts to develop a mechanism to fund research proposals that had a high risk of failure, but which also had the potential for high return, began in 1980. In that year a task force was created by the NSF Advisory Council to look at the issue of “highly creative or innovative” proposals for which there was “a high risk of failure.”

The task force’s report identified two significant hurdles the NSF needed to overcome to support high risk/high return proposals:

Robot surgeons promise to save lives in remote communities, war zones, and disaster-stricken areas. A grant from the National Science Foundation will allow researchers to design the optimum workplace of the future.

Robot surgeons promise to save lives in remote communities, war zones, and disaster-stricken areas. A grant from the National Science Foundation will allow researchers to design the optimum workplace of the future.

Each agency’s interest in the initiative is described within the document.

I noted the presence of USDA on the list with extreme interest, as you might expect, and am pleased to report that an effort to develop the sort of system I’ve previously described (replacing traction with dextrous manipulation) should be fundable within their guidelines.